Participatory cultures

Amateur rock musicians who came together to share performances
on YouTube are transformed into copyright educator-activists. Bollywood fans
stage a protest modeled on a powerful scene from a favorite film. A
website for discussing diamonds spawns a dynamic political forum. Contemporary politics are taking place in some
unlikely places, but are they really any less likely than the bowling
allies Putnam discusses? Why and
how do people who gather around popular culture so often emerge with
civic concerns? Our approach to understanding these instances and
movements draws on the work of Henry Jenkins who uses participatory
culture to describe
a set of practices much older than
the web but these practices have migrated onto the web because of its
affordances. From there, they have reached a much wider public. Specifically, borrowing from the Project New Media Literacies (NML) founding white paper, we define participatory
culture as one:

Digital media and online
communication have become a pervasive part of the everyday lives of
youth in the United States. Social network sites, online games,
video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now
well-established fixtures of youth culture; it can be hard to believe
that just a decade ago these technologies were barely present in the
lives of U.S. children and teens. Today’s youth may be engaging in
negotiations over developing knowledge and identity, coming of age, and
struggling for autonomy as did their predecessors, but they are doing
this while the contexts for communication, friendship, play, and
self-expression are being reconfigured through their engagement with new
media. (p. 1)

In an interview with
Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito elaborates on the project's findings and its
significance for studies of participatory culture:

Mimi
Ito: ....the main thing that distinguishes different kinds of youth new
media practices was the difference between what we call
"friendship-driven" and "interest-driven" participation. Friendship
driven participation is what most youth are doing online, and involves
the familiar practices of hanging out, flirting, and working out status
issues on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Interest-driven participation
has to do with more of the geeks and creative types of practices, where
youth will connect with others online around specialized activities ,
such as media fandom, gaming or creative production. (Ito, Mimi in
conversation with Henry Jenkins).

The
Digital Youth
Project suggests three potential modes of engagement which shape
young people's participation in these online communities. First, many
young people go online to "hang out" with friends they already know from
schools and their neighborhoods. Second, they may "mess around" with
programs, tools, and platforms, just to see what they can do. And third,
they may "geek out" as fans, bloggers, and gamers, digging deep into an
area of intense interest to them, moving beyond their local community
to connect with others who share their passions. The Digital Youth
Project argues that each of these modes encourages young people to
master core technical competencies, yet they may also do some of the
things that Putnam ascribed to the bowling leagues of the 1950s -- they
strengthen social bonds, they create shared experiences, they encourage
conversations, and they provide a starting point for other civic
activities.

Like
the Digital Youth Project, we recognize that the time young people
spend outside the classroom engaging with these new forms of cultural
experience fosters real benefits in terms of their mastering of core
social skills and cultural competencies (or new media literacies) they
are going to be deploying for years to come. While much has been said
about why 21st century skills are essential for the contemporary
workplace, it is important to recognize that they are also valuable in
preparing young people for future roles in the arts, politics, and
community life. Learning how to navigate social networks or produce
media may result in a sense of greater personal empowerment across all
aspects of youth's lives. Our understanding of participatory
culture includes these forms articulated in the NML White Paper:

Affiliations
- memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered
around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message
boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

In our approach, we recognize that participatory culture
has a history, indeed multiple histories, which stretch beyond the
history of specific technologies or commercial platforms. One one such
trajectory traces how the DIY ideals took root through the
countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s, which, as Fred Turner has
suggested, exerted powerful influences on the development of
cyberculture in the 1980s and 1990s. (Fred Turner 2008) We
might imagine another history that goes back to the emergence of the
Amateur Press Association in the middle of the 19th century, as young
people began to hand set type and print their own publications,
commenting on culture, politics, and everyday life.(Petrik, 1992) These publications were mailed through elaborate
circuits which resemble what we would now call social networks. This
same community was among the early adopters of amateur radio in the
early part of the 20th century at a time when it was assumed that there
would be almost as many transmitters as receivers. (Douglas, 1999) Or we might consider, as Patricia Zimmerman
does, the emergence of amateur camera clubs in the 19th century or the
growth of home movie production in the 20th century. (Patricia Zimmerman 1995) It was only later
that amateur media production got labeled as "home movies" (and locked
from public view) within a culture based less on grassroots production
than on the professionalization associated with mass media. Rather than
participants, mass culture turned fans into spectators. At this junction, fandom, as active
participation, provides rich insights into the practices and
significance of participatory culture.